George Russell kicked off his Italian Grand Prix weekend on the front foot as the Mercedes driver set the pace in second practice, but Ferrari were lurking and could well spring a surprise this weekend...
Liam Lawson believes Red Bull had a "productive day" during Friday practice ahead of the Italian Grand Prix, despite neither himself or team mate Max Verstappen challenging the leading contenders.
Lewis Hamilton admits the prospect of pole position for this weekend's Italian Grand Prix in front of Ferrari's home fans is "the ultimate dream", as he and team mate Charles Leclerc enjoyed a strong Friday.
Monza's long straights could expose weaknesses in Aston Martin's package, but Fernando Alonso insists he has "100%" faith that Honda will deliver.
A first win for Andoni Iraola’s Liverpool, the introduction of the latest star signing in Bradley Barcola making for a successful Friday night. Better yet, continuing signs that Alexander Isak, last year’s model, is coming back to life, his two, well-taken early goals securing the three points.
If Ipswich’s defending was less than watertight, Liverpool’s attackers were full of the speed and invention they sorely lacked for much of last season.
Continue reading...Lawmakers say agency must cooperate with investigation into death of nearly blind refugee in Buffalo
Democratic lawmakers are demanding that the Department of Homeland Security turn over records and fully cooperate with an investigation into the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a nearly blind Rohingya refugee who died after US border agents left him outside a closed coffee shop on a freezing night in Buffalo earlier this year.
At a press conference in Buffalo on Friday, standing just a few feet away from where Shah was found dead, Tim Kennedy of New York was joined by Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the ranking Democrat on the House homeland security committee, Lou Correa of California, and Nellie Pou of New Jersey in calling on DHS to cooperate with the Erie county district attorney’s investigation.
Continue reading...There are few scenarios since Millwall Lionesses broke away from Millwall and became London City Lionesses that would have felt more surreal than the idea of Alexia Putellas captaining the side to a statement win in a Women’s Super League season opener in Bromley just seven years later.
Here we are though. Referees have to get used to the former Barcelona captain stooping to pick up the coin after the toss, as is her custom. Players must get used to eyes and cameras looking past them to focus on the influential No 11, and the two-time Ballon d’Or winner has to get used to playing with players not drilled in a very specific style of play from such an early age.
Continue reading...
Looks tasty.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
on the water photography has added a photo to the pool:
The TOTO Museum (TOTO ミュージアム, Tōtō Museum) in Kitakyushu was opened on the occasion of the company's 100th anniversary and showcases the evolution of the business and its products. The elegant two-story building stands on the grounds of the company headquarters, has a showroom on the first floor and the museum on the second floor.
The museum leads visitors through the history of TOTO, beginning with the first ceramic flush toilet seat developed in 1914 and the company's formal establishment in 1917 as a pioneer player in the ceramic sanitation industry at a time when most of Japan was still without a sewerage system. Old toilet seats are on display, as well as exquisite porcelain tableware that the company used to produce as a side business in the past.
Old toilet bowls in the museum gallery
The exhibition moves on to washlets, arguably TOTO's most famous product today. Not only do modern washlets simply wash and dry toilet users, they also come with heated seats and automated flushing capabilities, play sounds to mask toilet noises, and automatically open and close lids. Another exhibition room is dedicated to the pioneers in the business and how their ideas and contributions led the company to where it is today.
One of the museum's highlights is the gallery showing the evolution of toilets and other TOTO products over the decades. These include toilet bowls, washlets, urinals, bath tubs and fittings. The last gallery displays bathroom units sold overseas, tailored to suit the different regions.
Source: Japan-guide website
The TOTO Museum ... was designed by Azusa Sekkei to reflect the corporate philosophy of "Lush Earth and a Drop of Water".
Architectural and Eco-Friendly Features
Concept Form: The building features a pure white, rounded shape that symbolizes sanitary ware and a droplet of water set against a backdrop of extensive greenery.
Sustainable Design: Designed with over 100 eco-friendly initiatives, it incorporates high-insulation architecture, solar panels, and solar chimneys for natural ventilation and energy efficiency.
Material Recycling: Pavement and exterior elements creatively utilize recycled ceramic shards and scraps sourced directly from TOTO’s manufacturing process.
Natural Lighting: Large windows maximize daylight penetration throughout the interior spaces, reducing daytime artificial lighting needs.
Claude censors 1930 book of poetry but can't say why. Intellectual Things (1930) is Stanley Kunitz's first book, published when he was 24. It has poems about the body, death, and the limits of reason. Kunitz was a lifelong anti-censorship activist, won the Pulitzer, and served twice as U.S. Poet Laureate.
[snip] An ironic side note I used AI to convert scans of the book pages into text. But partway through, the Claude session halted and displayed a message in red type: Request was blocked API Error: 400 Output blocked by content filtering policy I asked Claude what the issue was, and it said: An automated safety filter blocked the helper's output partway through. It's a filter on what the helper was writing, not on the book, the files, or anything you did — 41 of the 43 pages transcribed fine, and I read one of the blocked pages myself earlier with no trouble. [snip] Then it tried to read one of the pages itself, and was blocked again. I asked Claude whether it was a fascist. It said: Not my call, and I agree it's absurd. Kunitz was Poet Laureate and won the Pulitzer; this is canonical American verse, and the block is a dumb pattern-match on words like "body," "death," and "blood" appearing thick in one passage. I'm not the one refusing — the request never reaches me. I have no way to appeal it or turn it off.
[snip] An ironic side note I used AI to convert scans of the book pages into text. But partway through, the Claude session halted and displayed a message in red type: Request was blocked API Error: 400 Output blocked by content filtering policy I asked Claude what the issue was, and it said: An automated safety filter blocked the helper's output partway through. It's a filter on what the helper was writing, not on the book, the files, or anything you did — 41 of the 43 pages transcribed fine, and I read one of the blocked pages myself earlier with no trouble. [snip] Then it tried to read one of the pages itself, and was blocked again. I asked Claude whether it was a fascist. It said: Not my call, and I agree it's absurd. Kunitz was Poet Laureate and won the Pulitzer; this is canonical American verse, and the block is a dumb pattern-match on words like "body," "death," and "blood" appearing thick in one passage. I'm not the one refusing — the request never reaches me. I have no way to appeal it or turn it off.
NABATIEH (ANP/RTR/AFP) - De Israëlische krijgsmacht (IDF) heeft nieuwe aanvallen uitgevoerd op het zuiden van Libanon. Volgens de IDF had Hezbollah daarvoor een drone op Israëlische troepen afgestuurd.
Het Libanese staatspersbureau NNA berichtte over explosies in onder meer de regio's rond de steden Nabatieh en Tyrus. Eerder op de dag waren er ook al Israëlische beschietingen in het zuiden van Libanon. Daarbij werden volgens NNA twee jonge mannen op een motor gedood.
Het conflict tussen Israël en Hezbollah laaide in maart weer op, als gevolg van de oorlog in Iran. In april werd er in Libanon een staakt-het-vuren gesloten, maar daarmee zijn de Israëlische aanvallen niet ten einde gekomen. Ook houdt de IDF nog een groot gebied in het zuiden van Libanon bezet. Burgers mogen daar niet naartoe terugkeren.
OVERASSELT (ANP) - Een van de twee agenten die eerder deze week gewond raakten bij de schietpartij in Overasselt heeft het ziekenhuis verlaten en herstelt momenteel thuis van de verwondingen. De andere agent ligt nog in het ziekenhuis, maar is wel van de intensive care af. Dat zei Sara Cremers, hoofd operatiën van de politie Oost-Nederland in de talkshow Renze. Hoe zijn herstel verder zal gaan, is volgens haar onzeker.
Anthropic has blueprints for building e-commerce bots that shop on behalf of clients. That's not something many consumers want at the moment, but the AI biz this week published a set of templates for Claude-based shopping agents and merchant agents in the hope of encouraging more e-commerce businesses to implement automated purchasing. Its blueprint "contains the harnesses, patterns, and guardrails an engineering team needs to get a commerce agent running in days, with reference implementations of a shopping agent and a merchant agent for retail, travel, telecom, and ticketing platforms," the company said. Large retailers and ecommerce platforms, Anthropic observes, are using Claude to build AI agents to simplify online shopping by allowing customers to pose natural language queries to find, compare, and buy items. The buying bit may be wishful thinking: A recent Gartner survey found that while consumers use AI to find products and conduct research, they're not ready to delegate purchasing authority to AI agents. The survey found just 11 percent of consumers are willing to let AI make purchase decisions. A recent Accenture survey [PDF] is a bit more optimistic, noting, "Three in four (74 percent) consumers would let an AI agent handle routine tasks; one in three (32 percent) are ready to hand over purchase decisions; and 9 percent are open to fully autonomous shopping, before the technology is fully operational." Either way, at least AI-assisted product finding and comparison appear to be plausible activities. Anthropic's GitHub repo contains functional shopping and merchant agents that can be built with the Messages API, Agent SDK, or Claude Managed Agents. The biz's shopping agent blueprint comes with ways to connect to product catalogs, online shopping carts, checkout systems, preference databases, and purchase history databases. "A customer can say 'I need a tent, sleeping bag, and stove for a weekend trip with two kids,' and the agent can take it from there," Anthropic suggests, noting that its code supports guardrails "designed to constrain prices and products to actual catalog data, and avoids manipulative upsell patterns." Why might prices need constraint? Well, beyond the possibility of hallucinated pricing, there's considerable concern about how AI agents have the potential to compound the problems with dynamic pricing – where customers are charged different amounts for the same goods. "The rise of agentic AI, where algorithms monitor online behavior to customize costs, will likely exacerbate dynamic pricing," said the Brookings Institution earlier this year. "These agents can assess individual behavior and tailor prices based on a consumer’s shopping and purchasing history." Concerns about AI surveillance pricing were discussed last month at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing. In prepared remarks, Lindsay Owens, president and CEO of Groundwork Collaborative, a Washington, DC-based advocacy group, noted that already half of those using the Walmart app use "Sparky," the company's AI assistant. Those shoppers spend about 35 percent more than those who don't, Owens said. "These agents have access to swaths of data on customers – what shoppers tell them, what they’ve purchased in the past, and in some cases, what they’ve hovered over with their mouse or even what other websites they’ve visited," she said. "All of that can be used to infer exactly how much they’re willing to pay for a product and set the price tag accordingly." Even if shoppers can be assured of getting a fair deal using AI agents, there's another concern. Monica Eaton, founder and CEO of Chargebacks911, told The Register in an emailed statement that agentic commerce looks likely to create fraud problems for merchants. There isn't yet a framework for merchants to deal with AI purchases that consumers claim they didn't authorize. "Merchants cannot become the insurer of every misunderstanding between a consumer and their AI," she said. Anthropic's templates may prove helpful for AI agent design, but the real challenge isn't technical. It's about trust – consumers have to trust that AI will act in their best interest and merchants have to trust that AI will be accountable. That may take time. ®
There will come soft rains, Nancy Friedland